Ernest Hemingway wrote about bullfights, wars and the sea in short, punchy sentences. He also loved cats, and over the years shared his homes with a great many of them.

The story goes that a ship's captain gave Hemingway a white six-toed cat named Snow White. Sailors had long considered polydactyl cats lucky, possibly because extra toes help with balance on a rolling deck, and certainly because extra toes are extremely funny.

The cats who stayed

Hemingway left Key West, but the cats did not. Today the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum is home to around sixty cats, many of them descended from Snow White, and roughly half of them carry the extra-toe gene. Following a family tradition, many are named after famous people. They nap on the furniture, wander through the tours and ignore the visitors with real literary detachment.

An editorial review

We asked one of our own six-toed staff members to review this article in the style of the house's most famous resident. The full edit is below.

The cat sat. The sun was hot. The bowl was empty and that was bad. There were six toes on each paw and all of them were good toes. The human was late. The human was always late. The cat knocked the pen off the desk. It was a true pen and it fell truly.

We have decided to keep the original.

Fun facts about polydactyl cats

• Polydactyly is a genetic trait. It is usually harmless and can be passed from parent to kitten.

• It's most often seen on the front paws.

• Polydactyl cats are sometimes called "mitten cats," "thumb cats," or "Hemingway cats."

• The record for the most toes on a cat is held by a Canadian cat named Jake, with 28.